Ariel whirled around at that, her face angry. Her finger dug into his chest, prodding.
“No.No, you’re not, Derec. Your father’s responsible. Avery. Without his poisoning you with the chemfets, without his interference and his insane schemes, none of this would have happened-to any of us. You’re not responsible, Derec, any more than I am or Mandelbrot is or Wolruf is. You can’t blame yourself for any of it, and there’s nothing you can do about it. “
“There’s trouble,” Derec insisted. “I can feel it. I have to go see. Mandelbrot, I want you to see that our ship is provisioned and ready to go by noon.”
Mandelbrot hesitated, caught for a second between the conflicting orders, but Derec was his primary master. His orders took precedence over Ariel’s. The robot nodded and moved to the computer terminal on the wall. Mandelbrot activated the screen and opened a line to the Aurora Port computer.
Ariel shook her head, dark hair swaying with savage motion. She jabbed at Derec’s chest again with the forefinger. “You’re not doing it, Derec. No. If this phantom city in your mind has problems, then let it deal with them on its own. That’s what the central computer is for. And if it’s Avery again, if he’s used his Keys to jump from Robot City to some other place he’s set up, it’ll be a trap just like the other. I’m not at all interested in stepping into his deadly little webs again. “
“I don’t want you to. I wasn’t intending to have you go along. I thought just Mandelbrot and myself…”
The words didn’t come out quite as he’d intended. Because I don ’ t want you to get hurt again. he should have added. Because I care too much about you. But her face was already clouded, and somehow the words wouldn’t come now.
Ariel nodded, muscles bunched as she set her jaw. “Fine,” she said, her words clipped and short. “Just fine. I’m sorry I’m such a burden.”
“Ariel…”
But she was no longer listening. She went to her closet, snatched a loose smock from a hook, and tugged it on. She brushed her fingers through her hair and gave Derec one last smouldering gaze.
Then she stalked from the house.
“Mandelbrot,” Derec said after the reverberations of her exit had stopped echoing through the house. “You should be glad that you don’t have to deal with emotions.”
“It has been my observation that human feelings are much like fruit.”
“Hmm? I’m not sure I understand.”
“If handled roughly, both feelings and fruit are easily bruised.”
To that, Derec didn’t have a reply.
Chapter 9. The Hill Of Stars
SilverSide knew the normal pack routine with a kill.
The hunters would first tear open the abdomen and feed themselves on the warm, pulsing blood-rich meat. Afterward, their own appetites sated, they would use their crude flint-knapped knives and flay the carcass, cutting it into manageable chunks to be put on the carriers.
Now the kin circled uneasily around the dead WalkingStone. LifeCrier reached out and tapped at the thing’s stomach with a claw. “It’s stone, SilverSide,” the old wolf-creature said. “A magical creature from the FirstBeast. There’s nothing for us to eat. It’s a mockery.”
SilverSide came up to the body, the other kin moving aside for her. “KeenEye,” she asked, “have any of the WalkingStones been killed before?”
KeenEye seemed grateful for the attention, as SilverSide had expected. “No,” she said. “These are the Hunters of the WalkingStones; there are other kinds near the Hill of Stars, but they never leave that place. Every time before, we ran from the Hunters when we couldn’t hurt them. They’ve killed three hands of kin and more in the three dances of the moons since they came. The fire from their fingers kills.”
Three hands of kin-with the wolf-creature’s four-fingered hands, that meant that over a dozen kin had fallen to the WalkingStones in three months. SilverSide had seen perhaps thirty to forty of the wolf-creatures at PackHome. Twelve members of the tribe was a significant loss. It was no wonder that LifeCrier and the others were looking for divine intervention.
SilverSide crouched down alongside the WaIkingStone. She examined the thing carefully. Her optical circuits noted a seam running along the abdomen. She slid a claw tip carefully along the edge, narrowing and flattening the claw so that it slipped easily under the lip of metal.
She pried up. Magnetic catches held tenaciously, then finally gave as she increased the tension. The abdomen covering lifted, revealing an interior of miniature servo motors, linkages, wires, and circuit boards. The kin around SilverSide gasped.
“There’s no blood;’ KeenEye said in SilverSide’s ear, marveling. “No muscles, no meat, no stomach. How does it move?”
“Magic,” LifeCrier said again. “The Eternal Ones have set them in motion against SilverSide and the OldMother.”
The answer sounded right to SilverSide. She could not refute LifeCrier, not with the strange gaps in her knowledge. LifeCrier had told her of the struggles among the gods. SilverSide had found nothing to disprove that she had been sent by the OldMother to serve humans. Given that, it was just as likely that the WalkingStones may well have been sent by FirstBeast or some other rival of the OldMother.
Still…
“The Hunter is not magic,” SilverSide told them. ‘The WalkingStones are MadeThings. They are tools, like our flint knives or the travois. They are like the dolls the cubs fashion from sticks, only the WalkingStones are stuffed with stone chips and vines from the Void. The power in them allows them to walk, and they speak with a voice you can hear only in your head.
“Look,” she said and plunged her forepaw hand into the WalkingStone’s entrails. Her claws emerged again fisted around the colorful intestines of the creature: a trailing, knotted coil of wires. The kin howled at the sight, half in lament, half in wonder.
“These are the guts of kin’s worst enemy,” SilverSide said. “The cubs back at PackHome could at least eat a SharpFang. Even if SharpFangs kill kin, they can also feed us. But not these creatures. This is the inedible meat of the WalkingStones.”
“What are we going to do, SilverSide?” LifeCrier asked, and his question was echoed by the others around them.
SilverSide thought for a moment. Then she tugged hard at the array of wires. Bright sparks spat angrily, arcing and dying on the ground. SilverSide flung the tangle down.